Bücher der Reihe Sil International and the University of Texas at Arlington P

Kenneth Pike''s influence spread far and wide during the last half of the twentieth century. The contributors to this volume are just a few of the thousands of scholars whose work was influenced by Pike''s teaching and writing. These essays will help younger scholars grasp something of his intellectual influence through his contribution to linguistics, anthropology, and many other disciplines. Long before the concept of "endangered languages" came into vogue in the 1990s, Pike was instilling in his students the importance of recording, preserving, and working to keep alive the thousands of unwritten languages spoken throughout the world. Pike''s work with SIL International took him to many parts of the world as a consultant and lecturer. He worked with speakers of hundreds of indigenous languages as well as with SIL field linguists studying those languages. At the same time, he interacted with scholars at international conferences and lectured at universities in many countries. Essays in this volume include papers by authors from at least ten countries and six disciplines. Readers of this volume will find a rich introduction to the life and philosophy of Dr. Pike. They will see how he considered all aspects of life - language, culture, worldview, religion, and ways of thinking and learning - to be a coherent whole. They will also find the authors'' own comments as to how Pike influenced and contributed to their lives and work.

The reader of Quiegolani Zapotec Syntax will find a careful syntactic analysis of this language, presented descriptively and with a theoretical analysis. In the three sections of the book, Cheryl Black provides a coherent, explanatory analysis for many facets of the syntax of this VSO language. Part I describes the morphology and syntax, as well as anaphoric relations. Parts II and III provide a theoretical analysis of the various syntactic constructions, utilizing a Principles and Parameters approach. Part II examines clause structure, including focus and topic constructions, interrogatives, negative constructions, and their interactions. Part III extends the analysis to phrase structures such as verbal and nominal phrases. The final chapter demonstrates that the special quantifier constructions that mark number in the language exhibit the same basic principles and structures as the rest of the grammar, showing that a small number of principles or constraints can determine the full grammar of a language. Quiegolani Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. This language family has received relatively little attention by syntacticians, making Dr. Black''s work especially valuable. Theoretical linguists, as well as those mainly interested in description and typology, will find it of interest.

David Foris gathered the data for this volume during the sixteen years he lived in the northwest part of Oaxaca in Mexico. He settled in the Chinantla, a Mexican term meaning ''an enclosed place'', a region boxed in by high mountain ridges and difficult to reach. Foris makes available the knowledge he has acquired about the fascinating Sochiapan Chinantec language. It is an isolated language that exhibits a complex system of verbal inflection. Speakers of the language can use more than thirty tone-stress distinctions to communicate messages in whistle speech with minimal ambiguity. The majority of words consist of a single syllable; there are a small number of two-syllable words and less than a dozen known tri-syllabics. This model-neutral presentation describes everything from the phonemes up through phrases and clauses to compound sentences; from the changes of tone and stress to changes in nucleus to signal a wide variety of tense, aspect, and related features. Regarding this book, Dr. Rudolph C. Troike, Head of the Department of English at the University of Arizona, says, "This is overall a masterful piece of work which makes a major contribution to Chinantec studies and to language typological research in general."